Coffee with the Council Podcast: Meet This Year’s Europe Community Meeting Keynote Speaker, Ken Hughes
This episode of Coffee with the Council is brought to you by our podcast sponsor, Clone Systems.
Welcome to our podcast series, Coffee with the Council. I'm Alicia Malone, Director of Communications and Public Relations for the PCI Security Standards Council. Today I'm excited to bring you a preview of our 2026 Europe Community Meeting Keynote Speaker, Ken Hughes. Ken is a leading consumer and cyber behavioralist known for his dynamic high-energy presentations and his ability to translate complex ideas about technology, behavior, and trust into powerful insights for global audiences.
Listen to the full episode on Spotify or on your favorite podcast player.
At this year's Community Meeting in Edinburgh, Ken will take the stage with his keynote: Securing the Future: Human Trust, AI Intelligence, and the Heart of Payment Security. Ken, you're known for bringing a completely different perspective on topics like technology and customer experience. As you prepare to join us in Edinburgh, what drew you to the world of AI and what excites you most about speaking to this audience about payments?
Ken Hughes: I don't think any of us have been drawn to AI. I think we've just kind of all been thrown in, haven't we? You know, there's that Silicon Valley joke at the moment that nobody takes lunch anymore because if you step away from your desk and come back, it's all changed too much by the time you get back, and you don't understand what's going on. I think AI is probably one of the most exciting things that's happened for commerce and for business. I mean it's terrifying on one hand, as agentic AI comes down the road and particularly in my area, consumer marketing, and consumer branding - the death of marketing, the death of branding - agentic AI taking over the consumer decision-making process, humans not being involved in buying things anymore. That's terrifying for the entire marketing discipline. But at the same time, from a business point of view, it is probably one of the biggest changes we've seen since electricity or the industrial revolution. It’s a game-changing piece of technology that will disturb and challenge the way we do business, how we do business, and how we connect with customers. So, it's tremendously exciting.
Having a business during this time where AI is developing into what it will be, is like surfing the wave of opportunity. So, if you ask why I'm drawn to it, it's because it presents us with so many opportunities in terms of how we can build better connections with our customers, whether it's B2B, whether it's B2C, how we can push past the transactional nature of commerce that we had into a world of relational theory and experiential and emotional loyalty.
There was a movement in the nineties about personalization but really it was like an email that started with “Hi, Alicia. How are you?” You know, we used your name. Look at us, aren't we great? Whereas today, personalization is how you make a customer feel. They feel the trust, they feel the security, they feel the belonging, and those are all core things. Again, if you bring it back to why I'm interested in talking to this particular audience at your conference, payments and trust are one of the pillars of loyalty. I use a lot of relational theory in my work with human relationships and if you think about your own human relationships with friends, with family, with husband, wife, lover, the idea of loyalty, it derives from trust. You can't have a loyal relationship or any kind of foundation for a relationship without loyalty and trust. And these are security and safety, and all these are some of the things that are paramount to proper relationships. And it's no different really in the customer framework either.
A lot of my work is to do with heart, connection, and emotional entanglement. Whether it's B2B or whether it's hidden processes, payments often kind of talk about this kind of hidden process, why do customers care? They do care. And it's about us bringing our brands into the kind of spotlight a bit more for our customers.
Alicia Malone: So, speaking of trust, your keynote centers around a powerful idea that in payments, trust isn't just a metric; it's the currency. When you look at today's payments landscape, what do you think organizations still underestimate about the role of trust?
Ken Hughes: That’s a good question. I think financial services generally, as an industry, total industry, has been trapped in a kind of transactional snow globe for a long time. That they've seen their brands and their processes as just the next transaction, the next transaction, keep it safe, keep it secure. And really, at this stage, if you're a brand or a business and you're just transactional, the world has become a commoditized place, and technology can do that, and your competitors can do it better. So, there's no really competitive advantage left in the transaction. So, what we have to have is relationship. We have to move away from a transactional economy to a relationship economy.
The connection economy is what we call it now. People want to feel connection. I was doing some research recently with a Gen Z consumer, and she said something that just stuck with me. She was talking about brands she buys, and she said, “The brands that I invite into my life,” and then she went on to talk about them. When I play that back, I thought, that's a great way of saying it. “The brands that I invite into my life”, not the brands I use, not the brands I buy, not the brands I interact with. They invite us into their lives by choosing us. So, as a brand, we have to kind of respect that invitation and think, well, if we're being invited to the party, what are we bringing? Don't turn up to the party without a bottle of wine; what are we bringing beyond the product? Because if it's just a product, guess what? Your competitor has a really good product as well. And they've got good pricing and good promotion strategies, all those “five P” things; they've got all those as well. And very soon, the customer experience, even which we used to use as a competitive advantage, is also going to be commoditized by agentic AI.
So, everybody's going to have amazing customer experience, really speedy, and efficiency and productivity, and so what's left? The only thing that's left is some kind of belonging, some kind of link, emotional link, to you as a brand - that I feel some kind of emotionally entangled to who you are as a business, what you do, the security, the safety, again, those layers, those foundational layers. The move away from transactional into that relationship space, I think, is something that we all need to look at.
Alicia Malone: Yes, you mentioned AI being both terrifying and exciting, and it's really playing an increasingly significant role in both defending and attacking payment systems. So, from your perspective, how should organizations think about this balance using AI to strengthen security while also managing the new risks that it introduces?
Ken Hughes: I'm not actually sure that the average consumer knows how risky that is going to become. I think they're getting a little flavor of it now, but the scams and the security breaches are going to just become so advanced and very difficult for people to understand real from fake, so I think the consumer is a little bit behind the industry in terms of their awareness of that, but they'll catch up real fast. I think there's some stuff that happens behind the scenes that we don't need to maybe even talk to the customers about that AI can do for us. But very quickly, things that have been kind of operational behind the scenes become key to a brand or business. Like supply chain is a good example. Supply chain used to be just as a function, used to be a thing that happened. Now sometimes supply chain is the product. Like how the product is delivered to you becomes the thing that you want, you know? I mean anyone who orders a Domino's pizza, we all love watching the little motorbike on the app coming to us. So, all those little things add value.
And I think in the payments industry we're going to see the same thing. We're going to see, yes, AI increases the risk, but AI also is amazingly secure. The security layers, I think we need to get better maybe at talking about that to customers and giving them the, you know, I think dialing up the trust and being better at the comms piece and being clever at how we communicate that, not in a jaded regulatory technology way, but in an entertaining, funny because people consume information these days through that lens really. If you look at how people consume information on TikTok, on Instagram reels, they're consuming really important information, but they like to get it in a way that is a one-minute piece, that has some kind of entertainment angle on it. Obviously, get the core message across. I think, as an industry, financial services need to step up.
We've been always terrified in financial services about having any kind of sense of humor. Or any kind of creativity at all. You know, in terms of like it's all regulation and black and white forms and stuff. And that pervades and that's damaging to the financial services brands. It's been damaging the payment brands, and consumers, again, want brands with personality. They want brands with authenticity. So, we shouldn't be scared about creating those brands and using safety and trust and being very clear in all the communications, but doing it in a way that triggers a smile and triggers a feeling and things. Okay, I feel safe. It's a tight rope, I think. On one side, the risks are definitely going to get bigger and bigger and bigger as AI develops, but also our ability to deal with those risks also increases. I think we just need to be very clear and clever in how we communicate that to our customers.
Alicia Malone: That's a really great segue into my next question when you mentioned like feeling safe. One of the themes you explore is that security is not just technical; it's emotional. Can you talk a bit more about what you mean by security as an experience and how organizations can design for trust in a way that customers actually feel?
Ken Hughes: I'll delve into that a huge amount in my keynote at the conference. But most of my work is about that last piece of your question there, how you make people feel. Because really, no matter what you do with your product, your service, your processes, your policies, unless we're making someone feel, we're not really activating the emotional side of their brain. We're not activating dopamine, and those are the things that all form memories and emotional bonds, which is what we want to lay down the customer lifetime value loyalty piece that we're looking for. So, we have to engage emotions. If in every customer interaction, if you haven't engaged in any emotion, then really there is no brand link. There is no customer loyalty. How do you use AI and technology to experience emotion? How do you make people feel?
I had a great example recently. I was talking to Intermountain Health, the big US hospital group, and they had recently installed a very simple piece of AI. When you go to see a clinician, a doctor, and you're talking to them and you're telling them about the rash you had and they said, okay. What they keep doing is they keep turning away from you to chart on their laptop. So, they say, well, Alicia, are you on any medication, and they turn away and they tap, tap, tap, and this rash, when did it appear? Okay, right after Vegas. Interesting. And so, they're tapping away. But what it means is the 15-minute interaction, probably about five minutes of the 15 minutes would be spent with broken eye contact and a shoulder turned towards you as they're kind of admin charting during the conversation.
Now, psychologically, as a patient, what that makes you feel is less important than the admin. The empathy levels you're feeling from the clinician aren't great. So, they installed a really simple AI chart, a speak-to-chart system. So now instead of a laptop on the desk, there's nothing. The desk is empty. The clinician is looking at you straight in the eye for 15 minutes, body square towards you, you're talking, and every single patient that goes through this process feels really heard, seen, and valued. The patient's satisfaction scores are through the roof. But what the surprise with the employee satisfaction scores have also gone up because the clinicians feel that they're making a difference in the medical field for the first time. They're not bureaucrats; they're not admin support. So, it's a really simple metaphor and a good example of when you use AI in the right place, you unlock a feeling. Like people now feel a kind of a belonging, they feel a better experience. So go back to your point about security experience. It's about maybe making it more physically present because often security can be quite an invisible thing. So maybe we need to do better at making that a physical presence. We certainly need to make sure that we make people feel safe.
So really the focus, if you think about it as a sentence where you'd put the italics. We used to put the italics around the words “safety, security, and trust”. But I think we need to put the italics around making our customers “feel” safe, secure, and trusted. The italics go on the word “feel”. Like they're making them feel those things. Not just that they exist, not that they're just kind of transactional product things that we've invested in, that they somehow, in their lives, feel supported and secure from that. I think that's the challenge.
Alicia Malone: That is the challenge, I think so too. That’s a great example that you gave about connecting with your physician, for example. You talk about connection and relationships as the foundation of trust in a highly digital AI-driven payments ecosystem. How can these organizations maintain that sense of human connection while continuing to innovate and scale?
Ken Hughes: The depth and scale question. It is a seesaw and we come across it all the time. I like to use the education industry as a good example of that. So, if you think of the way education works, like we have a scale system. So, you have a classroom of 30, 40 kids, and the classroom, sadly, can only go at this pace of the slowest child in the classroom. So that's the kind of the scale. Then you think, well, depth is better, isn't it? So yeah, it's great. Let's have a one-to-one private tutor. But that's extremely expensive and extremely you know, it's difficult to achieve that for everybody. So, we end up in a scale world.
Now, then we had virtual education where you had a teacher or tutor online and thousands of kids can dial in. Okay, efficiency, great, but still the scale problem. And now you've got AI answering that. So now you've got AI tutors who are avatar, human-like tutors who can on a one-on-one basis get to know the kid and deliver the education in exactly the way they need. So, like, if you've got a seven-year-old who's really struggling with area and perimeter in mathematics and can't work out the difference between them, and plays hours and hours of Minecraft, of course. The AI system knows that. So, it'll take him into Minecraft, and it'll teach him about area and perimeter using Minecraft. And then he gets it. And then his 16-year-old sister, who is a big Taylor Swift fan, can't get her head around the demand and supply stuff that the teacher’s trying to teach her in economics. The AI Avatar will bring her back to the Eras tour and the ticket chaos and the Hunger Games and explain to her why they were $4,000 tickets because of demand and supply. So, this is an amazing example of AI taking the depth and scale and putting them both together. We can now deliver millions of those experiences on a daily basis to millions of people in one second, as all the AI is there behind it. And imagine if you layer on quantum computing onto that by 2030, where it goes. And so, every industry is the same, depth and scale piece. And part of your question there was about how we make them feel in amongst that.
I came across a wonderful example with Octopus Energy. They're a sustainable energy company in the UK. They sell a commodity product, which you could argue payments are kind of too. It’s a thing. And they sell oil and gas and energy, and you know, a big deal. They decided that customer experience would be their thing. It would be their competitive advantage. That's how they would make themselves different. And so, they invest heavily in CX (customer experience). And they looked at all the various touch points there were. One of the touch points was the call center. And when you call into your bank or your financial services, your insurance company, you’re put on hold and you might even be only on hold for two minutes, but those two minutes feel like twenty minutes as they play that awful music at you and you feel like, oh my god, kill me now. So, they were looking at that pain point, thinking, well, obviously we can scale up resources that costs.
And one of their executives had read an article in The Guardian around novelty and music and nostalgia. And all your listeners can try this after the podcast. The most powerful music you as an individual will ever hear is the soundtrack to the summer when you were the age of 14. So, you at 14, that long hot summer of potential and promise, I don't know what you were up to when you were 14, Alicia. But that summer has a soundtrack. And if you hear the songs from that summer, you will instantly be transported back to that 14-year-old self. The hairs will stand up on the back of your neck. It's a good feeling. It's a feeling of promise and potential, basically. And you'll smile and you'll have a little boogie. So, they built a really, really simple AI system that when you call in, like most inbound call centers have this anyway. They harvest your phone number the moment you call in, and they pull your account on screen ready for the agent to talk to you. So, you know that already happens. They went one step further. They pull the account. They pull the date of birth from the account. They kick it to a jukebox. And as you're waiting, based on your date of birth, you will get songs from when you were 14. So, there could be a hundred people waiting to talk to an agent, but each one of those people could be getting a different song based on what age they are. And so, you've moved the pain point, which is I'm bored, waiting for an agent, to hang up, I'm getting frustrated, I don't like this brand, to now you dancing in your kitchen. And the most common thing that agents hear when they pick up the call is, hey, hey, hey, I was listening to that. So, I don't even want to talk to you anymore. And so again, going back to my work around connection emotion. Think about all the insurance companies, the banks, all the companies that have had your date of birth for 50 years, and nobody's ever thought about using this. It's such a simple piece of data. Everyone has it; every business has it. But it takes a human in the customer experience planning to decide, let's use the data in this way with this piece of tech, and again, to make them feel. It's the creative application of the technology to make someone feel is what we should be looking at, not the tech. Not what we can do with the tech; how we can make them feel. If you start from there, work backwards, then you end up putting tech into your business that actually makes a difference to the customer experience. Otherwise, we're just putting tech in for efficiency, productivity, which, by the way, are great things, but it doesn't necessarily do anything for the customer experience.
So, I think as a metaphor, that example is great because you can come back to that example and everyone can obviously Google afterwards what songs that were up when they were 14 and listen afterwards and dance around the kitchen. But, as a company, I love that example because we should all be doing that. We should all be looking at what data do we have on our customers? How can we action that data in a way then that makes them smile? And the moment we do that, we start to create brands that are authentic, that stand for something that shares my identity, belonging, which is the roots of tribal fandom and belonging. I wrote a whole book about it.
And so, I think the payment industry needs to kind of pull itself up on that. I think we need to have a think about what our brands are. If they're a little bit invisible, why is that? How can we make them shine a bit more? And how can we use all the data? And let's face it, we have a lot of data. We have a huge amount of data on who these people are, what they're spending, and we don't action it. I won't use a percentage, but we don't action most of it. We should be using that data to reflect it back on people, obviously taking regulations into account and making them feel, making them feel that they're part of something they belong, that they're part of a trusted system, and we should show that to them.
Alicia Malone: That's such an excellent example of integrating that human connection when it comes to AI. Thank you so much. I'm so excited to hear more from you. One last question before we wrap things up. Since you are on Coffee with the Council, we like to ask our guests how they take their coffee, or if you're not a coffee drinker, what do you prefer instead?
Ken Hughes: Yeah. I don't drink coffee. My mother didn't allow me to drink coffee when I was like 14, 15, 16, studying for exams. She had this idea that it would give you the jitters and that you shouldn't have it. Then I just never developed a taste for it and still, like it's the most bitter thing, so I don't drink it. And, weirdly, now I'm kind of happy I don't drink it because most of my friends seem to be addicted to it and can't function without it. So, I'm okay. I am Irish, so we drink a lot of tea. But actually, if you want, my go-to is a coconut milk chai latte. That’s my go-to. I'm very sophisticated, with a little bit of cinnamon and nutmeg on top. That's my order. So, I'll expect that at the conference when I come off the stage: someone to hand me immediately a coconut chai latte, please. Thank you very much.
Alicia Malone: Well, thank you so much for joining us, Ken. We are thrilled to have you as our keynote speaker, and we can't wait to see you take the stage in Edinburgh.
You can catch Ken on stage as the keynote speaker at PCI SSC's Europe Community Meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland, October 20th to the 22nd. Registration is now open on our website, and we hope to see you there.
This episode of Coffee with the Council is brought to you by our podcast sponsor, Clone Systems.
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